In a great example of necessity being the mother of invention, the team at RapLeaf have designed and built a meeting room scheduling system that interacts with Google Calendar. Each meeting room has a node with LEDs and an LCD which show the room booking status from Google Calendar, and the users can simply book or cancel a room reservation by pressing a button on the node. Interestingly from a hardware perspective, communication between the nodes and master is via I2C and not Ethernet.

Furthermore the entire project has been made open-source, so head over to GitHub for the Arduino code, schematics and EAGLE files. And we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

When rapid-prototyping your Arduino projects that use an LCD, time and effort can be saved by using an Arduino shield with inbuilt LCD, such as the Freetronics LCD Keypad Shield, which contains a bright 16x2 character LCD and five buttons that can be read from only one analog input pin: